John Madden celebrates Thanksgiving with his own set of traditions

The last traditional Thanksgiving I remember spending with my family was the ketchup Thanksgiving.

I was just a kid at the time. My mom has cooked and sliced everything. She has the turkey and the dressing, this and that, the whole meal on the table. Well, I look around and there's no ketchup. I like to put ketchup on everything. So I get up and go to the refrigerator and bring back a bottle of ketchup, and put it on the turkey. Here she had been cooking for two days, and the first thing I do is douse everything with ketchup. That was about the only time my mom got really mad at me.

Since then, Thanksgiving has been more of a football gathering than a family gathering for me.

When I was at Jefferson High School in Daly City, a suburb of San Francisco, our final game of the season was always against South San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day. So dinner took a backseat to the game. In college, at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo, we would always play the weekend after Thanksgiving. So Thanksgiving usually meant a Thursday practice and a training table. It was the same thing when I was coaching the Raiders, though we did play in one Thanksgiving Day game, at Detroit in 1970.

Since 1981, I've spent every Thanksgiving Day broadcasting a game, and it is one of my favorite days. You can say, "Woe is me, I never get to be part of the tradition," or you can say, "Heck, we've got our own tradition, and it's pretty good."

For a Thanksgiving game we'll usually get to Detroit or Dallas on Monday night, then visit practices on Tuesday and Wednesday. Wednesday night we have a big dinner.

This is our traditional dinner for the FOX Sports crew. We have all the production people and all the technical people, and we have a turkey dinner at the hotel that night. We invite any football people who are out there on their own -- the officials, representatives of the league office, anyone on the road for the game. We end up with more than a hundred people. It's a chance to see everyone in an informal setting and have a few laughs.

It's also a chance to eat.

Now I'm an eater from way back, and one thing I know is that when you order turkeys, you don't bother with a head count. There's always someone who thinks they have it down to a science. If you say you have 100 people, they'll figure eight ounces per person and multiply it by 100. But that won't get it done with turkey. We made that mistake once, and we ran out of turkey after the first 20 guys.

What I've always figured is, if you have a table of eight, you need one bird. You use multiples of eight to order your turkeys, and then you throw in some extra.

Turducken has become part of our meal, too. Turducken is a New Orleans thing we found years ago. There's a butcher down there who makes it for us. Turducken is a deboned chicken stuffed in a deboned duck stuffed in a deboned turkey. And between the layers of meat are layers of dressing. So you slice it and you get turkey, dressing, duck, dressing, chicken. That's really good.

Another tradition is the Turkey Leg Award, which goes to the most valuable player on Thanksgiving Day. It started out just for fun in 1989. We gave the first one to Reggie White. He was playing for the Philadelphia Eagles and they beat Dallas 27-0. But a typical turkey has only two legs. What if you have more MVPs? What if it's the whole offensive line? Obviously you need more legs on the turkey. So then we started "creating" turkeys with more legs. We made four-legged turkeys, six-legged turkeys, eight-legged turkeys.

To do that we need a lot of turkeys. By Thursday morning, we'll have five or six turkeys and two turduckens on the bus. It's laid out like a buffet. We park the Madden Cruiser right by the trucks. All the production people are there, and they're all welcome. By the time we get to the next site, it's all gone but the carcasses.

This has been my tradition since 1981.

I expect Thanksgiving Day to mean something extra this year. Americans have started to think about everything we used to take for granted. Take the National Anthem, for example. We sing it before every game, and at some point television stopped covering it. I think people had started going through the motions and not thinking of the words. That has changed.

The same is true of "America the Beautiful" and the flag itself, and I think Thanksgiving is going to make us pay a little more attention. There always have been things we've said thanks for, but maybe we didn't put a lot of thought into it. Over the years we've said, "Today is the day to give thanks," and then we dive into a piece of turkey. I think people are going to really reflect this year.

I was in New York on September 11 when those planes hit the World Trade Center. At the time, it seemed like it was a local thing. But three or four days later, by the time we drove across the country in the bus, we realized it wasn't a local thing. You could really feel the states become united. We became the United States of America. Those have just been words for a long time. But something like this happens and we go back to basics -- what our flag means and what our National Anthem means. I think the same thing will happen on Thanksgiving.

I also expect to see some good football. We've seen a lot of exciting games over the years, and great individual performances by guys such as Barry Sanders and Emmitt Smith and Randy Moss. One good thing about Detroit is that you get some of those old-fashioned rivalries. We've had the Bears in there. This year we have the Green Bay Packers.

Green Bay at Detroit. How could that not be fun?

John Madden, former coach of the Oakland Raiders and lead NFL analyst for FOX Sports, will broadcast the Green Bay-Detroit Thanksgiving game (11:30 A.M. CST) with long-time partner Pat Summerall.